"A beautiful and powerful work [that] takes its place among the finest European fiction of our time."
–Elizabeth Hardwick "It is as a parable of war, whose guilts and neuroses reach well into the present, that this novel is so is so persuasive. We may read
The Assault in part as a thriller. But it is a political thriller that removes the postwar scar tissue protecting society. And it is a psychological thriller probing the moral devastation between neighbors, fellow students, husbands and wives. . . . It is Mulisch's triumph to have revealed all this with an X-ray cunning."
–The New York Times Book Review
